Mummies Were Not Meant to Rise Again

1. Blog
2. 2021
3. 10
4. How Hollywood Turned Mummies Into Monsters

How Hollywood Turned Mummies Into Monsters

Posted October 12, 2021

Boris Karloff famously played the titular mummy in Universal'southward 1932 film. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

by Riley Black

Mummies are large box role for Hollywood. Since 1932, when Universal Pictures addedThe Mummy to their growing pantheon of monsters similarDracula andFrankenstein, reanimated corpses wrapped in dusty bandages have been a staple of the silver screen. Some are meant to be scary, like the black-and-white classicsThe Mummy's Tomb andThe Mummy's Curse. Then again, mummies have often been played for laughs in movies likeAbbott and Costello Meet the Mummy andBubba Ho-Tep. And who could forget how the whole genre got a revival thanks to 1999'southward blockbusterThe Mummy and its sequels? There's something virtually mummies that keeps cartoon us back in time and again over nearly a century of filmmaking. But mummies were not necessarily destined to become such iconic movie monsters. Their office in Hollywood is much more circuitious, with the chilling silver screen renditions having little at all to do with their ancient Egyptian inspiration.

In ancient Egypt, mummification was a regular part of life. There was nix at all monstrous about the thought of carefully preparing a body for burial and the afterlife. There was no expectation that a mummified person would rising from the grave to wreak havoc on the living nor any magic spells believed to cause such a thing to happen. Instead, the mummification was intimate and laden with spiritual significance. Aside from the physical techniques used to mummify and preserve bodies - whether human or animate being - recitation of the proper spells and preparation of the coffin, sarcophagus, and identify of burial were all important parts of the process.

So how did western caricatures of mummies come to exist? Academy of California, Santa Barbara Egyptologist Stuart Tyson Smith has been earthworks into just that topic. The story goes dorsum almost 100 years to British archaeologist Howard Carter's expedition to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. It was there that the archaeologists found and opened the tomb of the pharoh Tutankhamun, a discovery that made headlines around the world. Only that was hardly all. The expedition's financial backer died of an infected mosquito bite, which a novelist suggested was the result of a curse in a alphabetic character toNew York World. The press ran with the idea, the story condign more hyped as it was repeated. Fueling the fire, some newspapers fifty-fifty mistranslated actual Egyptian writings to be more consequent with the thought of a terrible curse. The narrative was and then entrenched that the death of anyone who had been on the expedition or visited the tomb was attributed to the curse, regardless of the crusade.

Hollywood was more than than ready to capitalize on the gruesome rumors. In fact, by the time of the Carter trek in that location had already been several mummy-themed movies like 1899'southwardCleopatra'south Tomb and 1911's Mummy, which both focused on reanimated mummies terrorizing the modern world. Simply America'due south fascination with ancient Arab republic of egypt had just grown in the intervening years. Art Deco manner, heavily inspired past the perceived glamor and affluence of ancient Egypt, was extremely popular during the time of the Valley of the Kings expedition, including in picture show theaters like The Egyptian itself. The murmurings about an ancient curse and public fascination with the culture of ancient Egypt naturally led famed monster histrion Boris Karloff to play the titularMummyin 1932, although the portrayal wasn't quite the stereotyped monster nosotros know today. Karloff merely appeared equally a mummy during the film'due south opening, and information technology wasn't until Universal and other studies similar Hammer started to cash in on the trend that mummies became moving, homicidal threats to the living. The portrayal would have been entirely conflicting to aboriginal Egyptians - not only because many mummies are haphazardly dressed in decaying attire, but the entire point of mummification was the prepare a body to remain still and comfortable while one'south soul went on to the afterlife. Maybe it would have been better for the sensationalism that made monsters out of mummies to have stayed under wraps.

Watch Tyson Smith speak as office of our Stories from Arab republic of egypt series

Riley Black is the writer of Skeleton Keys, My Beloved Brontosaurus, Prehistoric Predators, and a science writer for the Natural History Museum of Utah, a part of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Our mission is to illuminate the natural earth and the place of humans within it. In addition to housing outstanding exhibits for the public, NHMU is a research museum. Learn more.

mottcappitst.blogspot.com

Source: https://nhmu.utah.edu/blog/2021/how-hollywood-turned-mummies-monsters-egypt

Share this post